A Posthumous Story Collection From Black Film Pioneer Kathleen Collins

"The very existence of this book feels to me like an assurance that while we may think we have done our archival work and unearthed all the treasures of black thinking women, there is always something more to find," the poet Elizabeth Alexander writes in her foreword to Kathleen Collins's rescued gem of a pioneering short-story collection, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? (Ecco Press). "Now, this is a literary voice that I can never unhear."

It's true! The stories cast a lively, emotionally penetrating eye on the lives of the urban black middle class in the 1970s and '80s. They make you ache with the powerfully felt sense of real people who value racial parity and collaboration, the aims of art and the necessity of commerce, fearless conversation and creative isolation.

Collins

Douglas Collins

Collins was a filmmaker and a writer, an academic and an activist; she'd been involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and carried its messages and maxims into the soul of all her work. With an MA in French literature and criticism from the Sorbonne, Collins joined the faculty at City College of New York, where she was a professor of film history and screenwriting. Entrenched in her time as an educated African American woman but ahead of her time as a creative visionary, Collins was among the first black women to write, direct, and produce a movie: Losing Ground (1982), a stylized and witty film-within-a-film about a restless, artistic married black couple living in New York City who each enjoy a summer of lust and learning in the company of their newfound lovers.

Collins was among the first black women to write, direct, and produce a movie.

The picture was unseen theatrically until 2015, when it drew raves (and comparisons to the works of Woody Allen and Éric Rohmer) as the headliner of the 2015 Lincoln Center series "Tell It Like It Is: Black Independents in New York, 1968–1986." The New Yorker called Losing Ground a "masterwork," while the New York Timessaid it was "a bulletin from a vital and as-yet-unexplored dimension of reality"—a territory that director Spike Lee would secure four years later with his indie hit, She's Gotta Have It.

But Collins died in 1988, at 46. Decades later, her daughter discovered the original 16mm reels of Losing Ground,had them remastered, and launched the effort to bring the film to light. The literary world also remembered Kathleen Collins, and used its powers to give us Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

Sensuous and immediate, the 16 slim, elliptical stories are built upon elegantly captured moments in the lives of black, white, and mixed-race characters facing family misunderstandings, existential doldrums, marital impasses, romantic conundrums—all while trying to nourish their creative and intellectual passions. "How Does One Say" unspools a secret affair between a young black student attending a summer French-language intensive and her older white teacher. Their mutual attraction is instantaneous, "like a wire going back and forth between them." In "Documentary Style," a talented black cameraman with a chip on his shoulder is paired at work with an equally adept black woman whom he considers to be "some smart ass high yaller chick." All the stories hum with far-seeing energy.

The triumphant title story of Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? is about two twentysomething roommates, one white, one black, sharing an Upper West Side apartment. The black roommate meditates in her shadow-filled room on the summer she had spent down South as a voter registration worker: "And that summer had brought her one startling and overwhelming realization: that she could marry anyone, not just a colored doctor-dentist-lawyer-educator, but anyone: A Mexican truck driver. A Japanese psychiatrist. A South African journalist. Anyone. Up to and including a white man. This was the ripest fruit from a summer spent picking cotton and cucumbers, and taking sun baths in Momma Dolly's chicken yard with another 'Negro' friend who was also escaping her bourgeois past. They were turning themselves into earth women, black (the word surfaces!) women of the soil, in harmony with the ebb and flow of nature, in harmony with the Southern earth of their ancestry, and the deep Southern sky, and the moody Southern stars."

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